On Tuesday 10 September 2013, Tod Fitch wrote: > [...] > And the Wikipedia page regarding alpine tundra affirms it: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_tundra > > But the closest looking tag I see at > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:natural seems to be > natural=fell
I had looked at that as well some time ago and found the same. natural=grassland and natural=heath could be used in some cases but those are quite specific and only make sense if either grasses or woody plants are clearly the dominating vegetation. > Fell appears to be a UK centric description for a subset of > alpine tundra: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fell natural=fell originally seems to have been introduced as a way of naming areas and not as a landcover tag. > There are currently no natural=*alpine* tags and only a handful > natural=tundra, the use of which seems to cover both alpine tundra > (mountains in Colorado) and arctic tundra (northern Canada, etc.) > without a way to distinguish which of the two are meant. > > What are the thoughts of extending the natural tag to include: > natural=arctic_tundra, natural=alpine_tundra and, possibly, > natural=antarctic_tundra Differenciating between alpine and polar tundra, possibly even arctic and antarctic via tag is pointless - not to mention that there is no way to draw a clear line between the two (i.e. in polar mountain areas). Although alpine and polar tundra ecosystems differ these differences are fairly subtle in a lot of cases. The real problem about natural=tundra is that it is a very broad classification. Essentially it starts at the treeline with often quite lush grass or woody vegetation and ends with scattered lichens. In a way natural=tundra would be orthogonal to the existing natural=wood| scrub|grassland|heath since it does not specify what grows there but instead says why it grows there (because it's beyond the alpine/arctic treeline). In this way it would be similar to natural=wetland (or the infamous natural=desert). Greetings, -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
